True North
by Mustard Yellow Sunshine
Summary: She was lost in the dark, and he was her guiding light, her evening star.
_"Upon my bed at night / I sought him whom my soul loves; / I sought him, but found him not."_

 _"... Love is strong as death / fierce as the grave. / Its flashes are flashes of fire / a raging flame."_

– _Song of Songs 3:1; 8:6_

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* * *

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At night, drifting in the hazy world between awareness and sleep, she dreamed of him. At night he was real. She spoke him into being by the whisper of his name, breathed life into him by the exhale of her own lungs, taught his mouth to speak by the press of her lips. He was found in silence and sleep, shaped from the pale cast of moonlight through her bedroom window, the golden blaze of street lights in the distant dark, the throbbing red blood of her own pulse. She dreamed and he came for her, as he had always done before. She dreamed and they were together.

She opened her eyes, and he was there. He shone in the dim evening shadows of her room. Standing beside her bed, his features were sharp and clear—like the gleam of a blade cutting through the dark. He stared down at her with torchlight eyes.

She sat up. Reached out her hand to cup his cheek. Her fingers stroked his skin, traced along the firm line of his jaw. She felt his wild sharp pulse, the rising tide of him.

"Inuyasha," she whispered, fingers clinging to the burn of his skin.

He leaned over her, drew slowly closer; eyes searing her, baring her, cutting all the world away.

"Kagome. Where are you?"

Her other hand rose, wove into the moon-silk of his hair, cradled the side of his head.

"Here," she said, "always here."

She tugged, and he gave way, lying on the bed beside her. Her arms circled his waist, her face pressed against the living flame of his chest.

"I'm always here, Inuyasha, always waiting."

He held her fiercely, exultantly. _Home_ , she thought, _finally home_. Sheltered by the strength of his arms, anchored by his beating heart—everything else fell away.

His lips brushed her forehead, trailed across her cheek, lingered against the shell of her ear. "Don't leave again," he whispered.

"Never." Her arms tightened around him, trembled. "I swear to you, never."

And in the darkness he shone. Her evening star.

"There is nothing but this," he said, "All else is unreal."

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* * *

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In the morning he was gone. In the waking hours he was a ghost, bones buried beneath the rubble of time, swallowed whole by the yawning divide of 500 years. Kagome would stare into the Bone Eater's Well as though staring into time's teeth, its endless greedy maw.

Sometimes she jumped into it—the familiar action blistering her insides raw—desperate for a flare of light that never came, a weightless flight that never happened. The Well stayed dark and heavy and silent. Without fail, she dropped to its bottom like an injured bird. She would kneel there in the dark and dig her fingers into the Well's earthen throat, its ash-and-dust belly, and scream until she could not catch her breath.

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* * *

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"Why do you leave?" he asked, long fingers stroking through her hair.

She buried her face into his neck, pressed the length of her body against his. "I don't want to."

"So why do you?"

"I have to. There's no choice." She paused, thinking of the sunlit world—school, homework, friends orbiting around her, subdued quiet of the house, concerned eyes of her mother. A world devoid of him. It awaited her at the end of every night, that world: dawn consumed night, consciousness stripped away dreams, and reality asserted itself.

"I can't sleep forever."

His fingers tightened in her hair, gently pulled her head back until their eyes met. His dark brows slanted in a frown, eyes nearly bronzed with emotion. His jaw flexed before he growled, "No. _That's_ the dream world. You may sleepwalk in it, but you're not alive there."

He leaned in, touched his lips to hers. " _This_ is real, we're real. You belong with me."

He burned her with his light.

"There is nothing but us. All else is unreal."

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* * *

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"Kagome, are you all right?"

"Fine," Kagome said, forcing the upward turn of her mouth. "Why do you ask?"

Worry tugged at her mother's brows. "It's just you seem distant lately, distracted."

She shrugged. "I'm all right. Just a little stressed, I guess. Still playing catch-up from all those absences at school."

Her mother's eyes the gentlest waters, washing away all pretense. "Just school, dear?"

The lie of her smile faded a little. She couldn't speak.

Those eyes were knowing and grieved. Maternal fingers brushed against Kagome's cheek. She nearly cried.

"I know it's been difficult for you this past year," her mother murmured, "I know you miss him terribly. But don't lose heart, Kagome. It will all be as it should. You'll see."

Time shut me out, Kagome wanted to say, and now it is relentless. A clock ticking in a locked room. The hidden riptide pulling my feet out from under me. Displaced so quickly I mistook seawater for sky.

Instead she said, "Okay, Mama."

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* * *

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In class, she learned that the moon had once been much closer to Earth—hundreds of thousands of miles closer. This did not surprise her: the moon seemed to hang vast and luminous in the sky 500 years ago, in the world eaten by the Well.

But she also learned that every year the moon spun farther away from Earth. Its retreat was slow—just under an inch and a half per year—but constant and patient. Every day, as she slept and walked and breathed, moon and Earth fell away from each other. One distant day, she knew, the moon's light would fade, extinguished from the sky; the night would grow darker.

This did not surprise her either. Time unmoored everything, set all adrift. Separation was the law of the universe.

 _Don't leave again._

 _Never, never._

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* * *

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That night, she clung to him.

"Tell me this is real," she breathed against his lips, "tell me you'll stay."

His body curled around hers—living flame, blazing star—mouth searing her back alive. His kisses were aggressive and consuming. They both freed and fettered her, stole and sustained her spirit. He did not stop kissing her, and yet his voice still whispered to her in the dark, echoing the words she'd begged to hear.

"There is nothing but this. All else is unreal."

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* * *

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"It's been over a year since the Well closed."

No. Endless days, an eternity of hours.

"You mustn't dwell on it, Kagome."

She was afraid she'd forget the precise hue of his eyes: sometimes golden, sometimes amber, sometimes the deepest ochre.

"Allow yourself to heal. Come up for air."

The timbre of his voice, how she could once read it like constellations.

"There's still life here for you, and people who love you."

His strange wild grace; a tangled forest of a boy, a fierce storm of a man.

"Don't give up hope."

All she could do was rehearse his name—over and over, steady as a second heartbeat—a spell against time's erosion. _Inuyasha, Inuyasha, Inuyasha, Inuyasha_.

"Everything will be as it should."

 _Inuyasha, Inuyasha_ , _Inuyasha_.

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* * *

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Then one night, she lived a memory instead of a dream.

She was suspended in deep darkness, blacker than any night, so dense it precluded the very possibility of light. A living void. Smothering, choking, bleeding into her brain.

From out of that void thrummed a taunting voice.

 _You will spend eternity alone in this darkness_. _No one is coming. Fate cannot be broken_.

The darkness stretched out its fingers, clasped her by the throat. Despair rose in her.

 _No one is coming_. _You are alone_. _No one_ —

Then, slicing through the black, her name. _Kagome! Where are you?!_

In the same instant—though she at first thought it a trick, another cruel illusion of the Jewel—a pinprick of light appeared. Faint, distant, a mere suggestion of light. But it burned a hole through the consuming dark, tore through the fabric of the Jewel's malice.

 _Kagome, can you hear me?_

The light shone a little brighter.

 _Kagome! Wait for me, wait until I get there!_

His voice like true north, revealing her path in the midst of the void. Her mind cleared, the dark claws withdrew. Darkness still surrounded her, but it could not touch her.

And she knew what to do.

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* * *

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 _Do you want to be with Inuyasha?_ the Jewel had asked her. _Do you want to be with him?_

She hadn't answered, because it had never even been a question. Not for her.

 _Inuyasha. You've always come for me. I'll wait for you._

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* * *

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She woke and the world had changed. Like the air after rain, everything seemed a little sharper, crisp and immediate: the cast of sunlight through her window, the clarion sound of birdcalls and car motors in the distance, the humming stillness of early morning. Even her body felt different, somehow. Fragile and new.

Memory had slipped beneath the veil of her dreams. Now, in the morning light, she remembered what she had forgotten: Inuyasha lived in more than night shadows. He was preserved in her memory. Time had not stolen it, could not corrode him.

Closing her eyes, she could see him again, ripping through the Jewel's shroud of darkness as though it had no dominion, enfolding her in his light and his safety. The man who had overcome time, traveled between dimensions, shouted his defiance of fate and the Shikon's power—all for her. She closed her eyes and saw him there, whole and radiant. Her evening star. She fixed the memory deep inside her: engraved on her bones, cradled between her ribs, staved by her spine. Time would not touch it.

 _Come for me again._

 _Always, always._

 _::_

* * *

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"Have you heard the phrase, 'time heals all wounds'?" her mother asked.

They stood side by side, washing dinner dishes at the kitchen sink. Kagome's hands stilled. Something inside her clenched, grimaced.

"Yes," she said. "I've heard it."

 _Don't tell me time heals. Time is a locked door._

"Well," her mother said, staring through the window above the sink, "I think that's only half right. Time itself heals nothing. It simply gives you the opportunity to find your own healing. The rest is up to you."

Kagome's knuckles whitened around the glass she held, but she said nothing, could not navigate the sudden weight of her own tongue.

"You may not remember this—you were much too young—but when your father died, I grieved the way you're grieving now. I carried it with me everywhere, nursed it like a child, but never spoke of it. My grief became a burden I couldn't share. It took me years to realize that grief was never meant to be a burden, but a gift. Grief comes from love, and love connects us to the one whom we loved."

Her mother's hand reached out, settled over her own. A soft touch and a battering ram all at once. "You grieve because you're separated, but in truth you're not. Remember that, Kagome. Grief is born of love; and your love is a tie that nothing can break against your will. Not time, not death, not distance."

 _Wait for me! Wait until I get there!_

When the wail erupted from her throat, her mother cradled her as she'd done so many times before.

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* * *

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After, when she met him in her dreams, she did not speak or ask for assurances. They lay together in the quiet shadows of her room, and she held him. She listened to the beat of his heart and remembered. But she could not bring herself to speak, to break the cathedral silence of the night.

In the night's shade, he glimmered like reified moonbeams, yet his body felt solid and real in her arms. His light no longer burned her. It was warm and gentle. It covered her, sheltered her. Near dawn, he rested his cheek atop her head and said, "There is nothing to fear. The darkness is unreal."

Her fingers trembled against his back.

"Wait for me," he whispered, "Wait until I'm by your side."

They held each other until the sun rose.

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* * *

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One day, the news radio promised meteor showers in the evening. After dinner, her whole family gathered outside in the twilight, faces upturned, watching the sky.

"You know," her mother said, wrapping an arm around Kagome's shoulders, "stars have long lives. They can live for thousands, millions, even billions of years. So the stars we see are the same stars our ancestors saw. Those same stars have watched over countless centuries of people. Isn't that something?" She squeezed Kagome's shoulders. Kagome leaned into her mother's embrace, and her smile was not a lie.

She and Inuyasha walked under the very same stars. It was as if his hand had reached out and clasped her own.

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* * *

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 _Do you want to be with him?_

 _Inuyasha,_ her heart drummed. _Inuyasha, Inuyasha, Inuyasha._

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* * *

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Her days became a staccato rhythm. School exams chatter sleep dreams wake. She clung to Inuyasha in the night, but now they both stayed silent and she woke feeling lost. Something was being born in the silences between them; to speak would be to rob it of life. Even so, the silences felt like chasms.

Then she dreamed of the Jewel again, of the wish she'd made, of the Well's—or maybe the Shikon's—final revenge. She woke gasping his name. The empty quiet of her room did not calm her. It pierced her, clawed at the tangled agonized knot inside her. And suddenly grief ignited into something else, something that flamed like rage. She'd hardly drawn another breath before she stormed to the wellhouse. The Well hunched there in the dark like a fallen god. She vaulted over its lip, and for a moment felt the old exhilaration. Then she fell straight to its earthen bottom.

No flare of light, no other world.

She stared into time's teeth and then she bared her own.

"You haven't won," she said, voice ringing in the hollow dark. "You've shut me out, but you haven't severed us. He reaches me in memory and the light of stars, he comes for me like he always has and always will. We're tied together. You haven't won."

Separation was the law of the universe, but she and Inuyasha would break it as surely as they'd broken the laws of time.

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* * *

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"Wait for me," he said, his hands gentle as they stroked down her back. "Wait and I'll be by your side."

For the first time in months, she answered him. "Always, Inuyasha. I'll always wait for you."

His lips found hers. "There is nothing to fear. All will be as it should."

By dawn's light, he had faded. He did not return to her dreams.

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* * *

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In class, she learned about the zenith and nadir points of the celestial sphere, the highest and lowest points from a given location. She learned how these points were measured by the position of observer and horizon. How the zenith was a vertical line—up, up—from the nadir, the tug and pull of gravity.

She felt oddly comforted by this. That to find her zenith, from wherever she was, she need only look up.

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* * *

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Life's staccato continued to drum, a song she learned to sing anew each day. She went to school and passed exams; she laughed with friends and argued with Sōta; she slept without dreams and woke to the sunlit world. The scales of grief began shedding from her shoulders and lungs and heart. What emerged was still raw, but hale.

She thought of him, always.

Then one day—a day of achievement, a day of ending, her mother's eyes knowing and grieved and loving—the Well called to her, tugged at her spirit. She went to it.

 _Do you want to be with Inuyasha?_

 _Always_ , her heart answered.

When she looked into the bottom of the Well, she saw stars.

She jumped.

 _::_

* * *

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Inuyasha held his hand down to her. The brightest polestar in a once-empty sky.

She smiled and reached up.

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* * *

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 **A/N** : My take on Kagome's grieving process during her three-year separation from Inuyasha. This is an unusual narrative style for me—my prose tends to be pretty straight-laced—and I had a lot of fun with the language and metaphors. Please let me know what you guys think! Feedback/concrit is very helpful and super appreciated.


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